The Romance of Mississippi 
Valley History 



BY 



REUBEN GOLD THWAITES 



REPRINTED FROM THE PROCEEDINGS 
OF THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF 
THE CONSTITUTION OF IOWA AND 
PUBLISHED BY THE STATE HISTORICAL 
SOCIETY OF IOWA IN NINETEEN SEVEN 



THE ROMANCE OF MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 



With the compliments of 



THE AUTHOR 



The Romance of Mississippi 
Valley History 



BY 

REUBEN GOLD THWAITES 
It 



REPRINTED FROM THE PROCEEDINGS 
OF THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF 
THE CONSTITUTION OF IOWA AND 
PUBLISHED BY THE STATE HISTORICAL 
SOCIETY OF IOWA IN NINETEEN SEVEN 



Gift 

Author 
(Poricii) 




THE ROMANCE OF MISSISSIPPI 
VALLEY HISTORY 

We may as well acknowledge that only the 
few read history as a recreation. To the world 
at large, the picture of the Past will always be 
dim, save as illumined by the masters of romance. 
Their presentation is often false in portraiture, 
incident, perspective — facts being more or less 
distorted to suit the whim of the artist; but, 
although lacking in accuracy, their tableaux are 
popularly accepted as true, and so vividly paint- 
ed are they that historians seek in vain to correct 
them. 

The history that lives in our memory, that 
permanently appeals to our imagination, is in 
large degree the history portrayed by our novel- 
ists and poets. Scotland lives for us in that 
region of fancy depicted by Burns, the Waverly 
Novels, and ** Kidnapped." Ireland would 
practically be unknown save for Lever, Moore, 
and Lover. England will ever be the stage 
whereon walk the characters of Shakespeare, 
Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer-Lytton, 
Wordsworth, and Tennyson. Our France is the 
land of Dumas, Hugo, Balzac, and Zola. 



MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 



It is the fashion for most historians, devotees 
as they are of scientific exactness, to decry this 
tendency of the masses to take their chronicles 
in the sugar-coated form ; they declare that his- 
tory warped to the purposes of romance is worse 
than no history at all. But I, for one, am some- 
what inclined to differ with my sober-minded 
colleagues. I see great value in romance as a 
hand-maiden of history — provided always that 
the romancer be honest, and adept at his craft. 
If forsooth John and Mary take not kindly to the 
history of the historians, then am I quite content 
that history should serve as a framework for the 
romance that they will accept. Historians there 
are, such as Motley, Prescott, Parlanan, Gibbon, 
Macaulay, Guizot, who with lofty imagination 
and consummate art reconstruct the stage of his- 
tory, re-dress and re-people it, so that one may 
contemplate as through an open window the 
pageant of the Past. The clientele of chroniclers 
such as these, is wider than the circle of admiring 
friends who applaud the thesis of the latest can- 
didate for the doctor's hood. Yet after all, men 
and women who know well even their Gibbon and 
their Parlanan, constitute a small fraction only 
of that restricted group of human beings whom 
we dub ' ' cultured. ' ' To the multitude, the ' ' Rise 
and Fall" either of Rome or of New France is 
and ever will be caviare. 



MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 



If then we would have awakened in the mind 
of the man of the street and of the club an intel- 
ligent appreciation of the impressive lessons 
taught by the world's experience, let us welcome 
right heartily good historical romance, and 
patriotic verse that has the proper ring. The 
novelist and the poet being the real teachers of 
history to the masses, we must needs seek to in- 
struct these inspired interpreters, to direct them 
to the salient points in our nation's annals, and 
be exceeding glad that they have the God-given 
faculty of attractively clothing our dry bones of 
facts with flesh and blood, and of so endowing 
them with the breath of life that they walk freely 
in the market place. 

In the field of American history, the roman- 
tic period of Colonial and Revolutionary life has 
of late years attracted the attention of many 
poets and novelists, some of whom reveal genuine 
powder; their works have been eagerly read by 
hundreds of thousands to whom history as his- 
tory possesses few charms. The undoubted 
result has been a general quickening of patriot- 
ism, a stirring of the national consciousness. 
Much of the Atlantic sea-board has now become 
recognized as a storied land. A steady throng 
of pilgrims dwells with enthusiasm on scenes 
associated with the doughty heroes of historical 



MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 



fiction, and incidentally worships at real his- 
toric shrines. 

The vast plains of the trans-Missonri, the 
Rocky Mountains, and to some extent their 
western slopes, have also found their singers 
and their tellers of folk-tales. Bret Harte, 
Joaquin Miller, and a score of imitators and 
successors, have made this a region of romance, 
with whose life and features we, through their 
eyes, are all of us familiar. But, with a few 
notable exceptions that will readily occur to you, 
the history of the great valley of the Mississippi 
has been neglected by those who practice the 
arts of fiction. 

Records of sales of Middle Western books 
seem to warrant the conclusion that Americans 
at large believe the story of our great valley 
to be of slight significance: that, like ''Topsy," 
the trans-Allegheny simply "growed" — devel- 
oped in a prosaic sort of way, chiefly as the 
result of physical pressure from the East for 
a wider field of activity; that the killing of the 
Indians, the hewing of the forests, the breaking 
of lands, and the vulgar commonplaces of the 
rude frontier as set forth in Dickens's Notes and 
Mrs. Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Ameri- 
cans constitute the entire tale; that the Middle 
West has become interesting to civilized men 



MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 



only since it has taken on the prosperity and 
manners of the East. 

This is a popular delusion. In truth, no 
section of our land has a tale of higher import 
or better worth the telling. There is much yet 
to do on the part of historians of the Middle 
West towards the popularizing of their theme. 
So busy have they been, mining crude ore in 
new veins constantly opening to their view, that 
they have not adequately minted their precious 
metal into the coin of literary commerce. 

At the golden jubilee of this still young and 
ambitious association, which upholds the torch 
of history here upon the sweeping prairies of 
our Middle West, other participants in the pro- 
gramme have discussed or are to discuss certain 
social, economic and political aspects of its past. 
It seems fitting, therefore, that we devote at 
least one brief hour to some consideration of 
the romantic side of its annals, the phase that 
must and will be insisted upon if Western his- 
tory is to pass current with the multitude. 

The giant stage of our drama is most pic- 
turesquely set. The Mississippi majestically 
sweeps through its valley from well nigh the 
sub-arctic to the sub-tropic, with broad, wind- 
ing affluents to left and right, whose head- 
springs lie afar in the Appalachians and the 
Rockies, the lofty rims of this monster basin. 



10 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 

Its northern reaches are closely approached by 
the mighty drainage trough of the east-flowing 
St. Lawrence; and easy portage paths between 
the two systems have been followed by man 
from the earliest historic times. Across the 
Appalachians, also, communication is facilitated 
by convenient carries between the headwaters 
of the Atlantic rivers and those of the West. 
To the far north, a vast net-work of lakes and 
divergent streams leads deviously to the Arctic 
Ocean; while adventurers early penetrated to 
the Pacific, overland from the Missouri and the 
far-stretching systems of the Saskatchewan and 
the Assiniboin. 

The first actors on this arena were the most 
interesting and picturesque barbarians ever 
encountered by ci\dlized man. Of several lin- 
guistic groups, representing hundreds of con- 
testant tribes, they varied widely in physiog- 
nomy, speech, habits, and costume, as well as 
in stages of culture, but nearly all were hunters 
and warriors of no mean capacity. Wandering 
hither and yon in the elusive search for food, 
which in forest or stream often led them far 
afield, they nevertheless were quick to resent 
any trespass on their own domain ; so that inter- 
tribal warfare was frequent, and the political 
map of the region as shifting as patterns in a 
kaleidoscope. 



MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 11 

At the time of the European discovery, life 
among the American Indians was in large 
measure an alternation between hunting and be- 
ing hunted, between hours of feast and weeks of 
famine. They were rational humans, in the 
child stage of development ; friendship and strife 
and joy and sorrow were theirs as well as ours; 
virtue had its rewards, and vice met with much 
the same penalties as with us ; success or failure 
was open to each individual, for the village was 
a pure democracy; there were believers in mir- 
acles, and those who scoffed at them; good men 
and bad, and cowards and brave; heroes and 
heroines there were, in every walk of life ; among 
them, love wrought both blessing and sorrow, 
and there was marrying and giving in marriage. 
It was not exactly the idyllic existence portrayed 
in the ''Leatherstocking Tales," any more than 
our own work-a-day world is a continuous round 
of melodrama. Cooper, who set the pace for 
a thousand imitators, might have wrought more 
truly had he understood his aborigines as thor- 
oughly as does the modern ethnologist. Worthy 
novels of real life among the Red Indians are 
yet to come ; the grain is abundant, but not until 
now has the harvest been prepared. 

The advent of the Spanish explorers in our 
valley was meteoric in its brilliancy, and their 
departure almost as sudden. The conquest of 



12 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 

Mexico by Cortez had made that hardy adven- 
turer the hero of Christendom, and others sought 
to rival his splendid achievements. The dis- 
tressing adventures of Cabeza de Vaca and his 
three companions, who for eight years wandered 
through deserts and forests and hostile tribes, 
while crossing the continent from Florida to 
the Gulf of California; and the long and fruit- 
less quest among the adobe pueblos of the South- 
west for the fabled ''seven golden cities of 
Cibola," culminating in Coronado's romantic 
expedition, perhaps the most remarkable of 
modern times — these are hero tales illuminating 
our annals, and awaiting the glamor of artistic 
fiction to become widely known of men. 

He who seeks rich color, will doubtless find 
the French regime the most entertaining epoch 
of Mississippi Valley history. Entrenched with 
apparent security on the rock of Quebec, New 
France early dispatched her explorers up the 
majestic trough of the St. Lawrence. With rare 
enterprise and bravery they gradually pushed 
their way up toilsome rivers, along westering 
portage paths, and far over into the vast-stretch- 
ing wilderness of the continental interior. 

Where are there finer examples of dramatic 
adventure than the great journey of Nicolet, 
sent by Champlain into Darkest America to dis- 
cover a short route to China? Donning his 



MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 13 

diplomatic garb of figured damask to meet sup- 
posititious mandarins, lie encountered only 
naked Winnebago savages on the inland waters 
of Wisconsin. What more stirring incident in 
history than the famous expedition of Jolliet 
and Marquette to discover the far-away Missis- 
sippi, as in stately curves it glided past eroded 
bluffs and through sombre forests toward the 
Southern Gulf? or, the fur-trading quests of 
those masterful adventurers, Radisson, La Salle, 
Tonty, Perrot, Du I'Hut, and a host of kindred 
spirits? Is there anywhere a nobler instance 
of self-sacrifice than the splendid martyrdom of 
the Jesuit missionaries, who, imbued with the 
zeal of mediaeval saints for the faith that was 
in them, often suffered the horrors of the 
damned ? 

Establishing themselves, as well, on the Gulf 
of Mexico, the French sought to connect Louis- 
iana with Canada by means of a thin line of forts 
along the interlacing waterways of the Missis- 
sippi and the Great Lakes. Traders, soldiers, 
missionaries, professional explorers, and polit- 
ical agents, in due time threaded every impor- 
tant stream in the two great continental drainage 
systems. The Bourbon "sphere of influence" 
with the barbarian tribes extended from Atha- 
basca to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Black 
Hills to Cape Breton. It is not surprising that 



14 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 

with this advantage they should confidently 
have hoped to hem Englishmen in to the nar- 
row slope of the Atlantic hills, and ultimately to 
drive them into the sea. 

Many a picturesque account of life at the 
St. Lawrence forts of New France is to be found 
in the pages of the historian Parkman, and in 
the novels of William McLennan, Gilbert Par- 
ker, and Mary Hartwell Catherwood. We know 
of the annual trading fleets of canoes and bat- 
teaux from the far distant regions of the Upper 
Lakes and the Mississippi, journeying over a 
thousand miles to barter rich furs for colored 
beads and glittering trinkets fashioned in Brit- 
tany and Paris. Piled high with bales of pel- 
tries, and propelled by gaily-appareled savages 
and voyageurs, with black-robed priests for 
passengers, the flotillas swept down the broad 
rivers in rude procession, paddles flashing in 
the sun, the air rent with barbaric yells and 
the roaring quaver of merry boating songs. We 
can hear and see the boisterous welcome from 
the garrisons of Lower Canada; the succeeding 
weeks of barter and mad carousal on the strand 
of Quebec or of Montreal; and then the return 
of the copper-skinned visitors to the "Upper 
Country," tricked out in gaudy finery, bearing 
into the wilderness fresh stores of gew-gaws, 
and accompanied by another contingent of 



MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 15 

traders and explorers — often, also, by Jesuit 
missionaries bent on showing them, even against 
their will, the path to the White man's Manitou. 

Away off in the then mysterious land of the 
Far West, were insignificant military outposts, 
bulwarks of the authority of New France — 
Detroit, Mackinac, Green Bay, Chequamegon 
Bay, Vinceimes; and, ranged along the Missis- 
sippi, Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Chartres, and many 
another rude bankside fort or stockade, all the 
way from Lake Pepin to Natchez. 

Around each of these little forest strong- 
holds — of logs or of stone, as materials came 
best to hand — was clustered a tiny hamlet of 
habitants : boatmen, tillers of the soil, mechanics, 
according to bent or to necessity. At the head 
of society in this rude settlement was the mili- 
tary commandant — sometimes a worthy scion 
of the petty nobility, but too often, especially 
in the later decades, a dishonest braggart, living 
like most of the officials of New France, upon 
blackmail and thievery. 

Next in social precedence was the Jesuit 
Father, whose scanty chapel lay just within the 
gate ; he, too, perhaps of noble birth and train- 
ing, inevitably a scholar, but bound by unalter- 
able vows to a life of toilsome self-sacrifice for 
the winning of savage souls in these inhospitable 
wilds. Ever was he coming and going upon long 



16 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 

and wearisome journeys among the tribes, his 
life frequently embittered by the jealousy of the 
commandant. 

Visiting the frontier fort were always wan- 
dering traders, each at the head of a band of 
rollicking voyageurs, jauntily clad in fringed 
buckskins and showy caps and scarfs, with a 
semi-savage display of bracelets, dangling ear- 
rings, and necklaces of beads. The coureiir de 
hois, or unlicensed trader — a career involving 
considerable risk, because defying the fur-trade 
monopoly of New France — accompanied by a 
sprightly party of devil-may-care retainers, was 
not an infrequent caller, upon unlieralded expe- 
ditions here and there through the dark wood- 
lands and along sparkling waters. He was in 
his day the most daritig spirit and the widest 
traveller in North America. 

Freely mingling with this varied and varie- 
gated company were bands of half -naked, long- 
haired savages and half-breeds, glistening with 
oils, and tricked out with paint and feathers. 
For the most part the boon companions of the 
French, now and then would they smite their 
White allies with cruel treachery, suddenly 
converting into a charnel-house many a self- 
confident outpost of the far-stretching realm of 
the great Louis. 



MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 17 

Upon this inviting amphitheatre of New 
France, we find a heterogeneous feudal society, 
with feudal manners and customs, and a never- 
ending variety of connections with the Old World 
— social, political, and mercantile complications 
being multiplied by the adventurous and diver- 
sified aims and pursuits of the colonists, scattered 
as they were through thousands of miles of sav- 
age wilderness. 

We have also here an economic and social 
study of the most fascinating character — on 
the one hand, a partial adjustment of the tribes- 
men to the ways of the Whites, their complete 
conversion from a semi-agricultural people to 
nomadic hunters of fur for the French traders, 
their absorption of the worst vices of Europe 
at the same time that many abandoned nature- 
worship to become devotees of Christianity; on 
the other hand, the adaptation of the most pol- 
ished of Europeans to the conditions of the 
wilderness, even to fraternizing and intermar- 
rying with the savages, implicating themselves 
in the internecine feuds of the forest, and at 
times adopting the dress and methods of their 
barbaric allies, while conducting a partisan 
warfare against the borderers of the English 
colonies. Nobles and peasants, priests and 
adventurers, soldiers, merchants, artisans, and 
fishermen, nuns and fine ladies, all mingled freely 



18 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 

in this thrilling tragedy of the old regime. The 
air quivered with the whisperings of dark 
intrigue; men and women in rich laces, aping 
the rotten court at Versailles, played with lives, 
fortunes, honor, as with dice; the King's favor- 
ites, civil and military, from Governor down to 
wilderness factor, robbed His Majesty's subjects 
as jauntily as an old-time hero of the English 
highway relieved my lord bishop of his purse. 

Amid much that was sordid and dishonor- 
able — yet undeniably picturesque, as became 
the age and the people and the free-and-easy 
frontier conditions under which they lived, and 
the sad example set them by their exalted high- 
nesses at home — we find an unaffected charm 
of manner, a flavor of honest chivalry, and such 
a wealth of stirring incident and unselfish loy- 
alty to duty, as in the recital sets the heart afire. 

At last, one fateful summer, the men of the 
hamlets and wilderness stations, seigneurs and 
tenants, traders and voyageurs, commandants 
and soldiery, were summoned by Indian runners 
to hasten to the Lower St. Lawrence, to free 
New France from the English invaders, whose 
very existence was to not a few of these forest 
exiles practically unknown. On the Plains of 
Abraham many a brave fellow from the Upper 
Lakes and the Mississippi Valley gave up his 
life for the fleur de lis. But all was in vain. 



MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 19 

for the time had come to ring down the curtain 
on this gallant drama. New France was no 
more. 

The English, however, won only that portion 
of the great valley lying eastward of the river; 
upon Spain, France by secret treaty bestowed 
New Orleans and the trans-Mississippi. Eng- 
lish explorers, fur-traders, and settlers from 
Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas had 
for a full century trespassed on French pre- 
serves to the west of the Appalachians, and 
tampered with the Indian allies of the Bourbons. 
The temerity of these fearless over-mountain 
adventurers directly incited the French and 
Indian War, which had resulted in the dovni- 
fall of New France. King George now sought 
in a single proclamation to please the Indians, 
to cultivate the fur-trade, and to check the 
dangerous growth of his restless coast colonists, 
by forbidding them save by royal permission 
to settle on lands to the west of the mountains. 
The injunction was idle; the expansion of the 
English colonies in America proved irresistible. 
The Great West was theirs, and they proceeded 
in due course to occupy it. 

Contemporaneously with the uprising of the 
American colonies, began a great transmontane 
irruption of buckskin-clad borderers from the 
Atlantic uplands into Kentucky, whither Finley, 



20 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 

Boone, the Long Hunters, and their several pred- 
ecessors, had led the way. This Arcadia of 
forests and glades and winding streams and 
incomparable game was won from savagery 
only after long years of sturdy warfare. The 
story of that winning is filled to the brim with 
picturesque and tragic incidents. Cherokee, 
Catawba, and Shawnee, moved to vengeance by 
persistent pressure upon their hunting grounds, 
fought after their own wild standards and 
fought well, for what they held most dear ; they 
would have been cravens, not to have made a 
stand. The White man, pouring his ceaseless 
caravans through Cumberland Gap and down 
the broad current of the Ohio, brooked no oppo- 
sition from an inferior race, for White man's 
might makes right, and struck back with a fury 
often augmented by fear. Such is the blood- 
stained story of our method of conquering the 
wilderness. 

To save Kentucky from the northern In- 
dians, who were being egged on by the British, 
and who used the forts of King George as ral- 
lying points for devastating forays against 
American backwoodsmen, George Rogers Clark, 
at the head of that now famous band of Vir- 
ginia frontiersmen, many of whom were garbed 
in an airy costmne combining that of the High- 
lander with that of the savage, undertook his 



MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 21 

hazardous but successful expedition against Kas- 
kaskia and Vincennes; an event abounding in 
dramatic scenes that will doubtless live long in 
American story. 

Kentucky having at last quieted the abor- 
igine by crushing him, now entered upon a period 
of relative prosperity. Down the swift-rolling 
Ohio, through several decades descended a cur- 
ious medley of oar- and sail-driven craft, made 
in the boat-yards of the Allegheny, Youghio- 
gheny, and Monongahela — rafts, arks, flat- and 
keel-boats, barges, pirogues, and schooners of 
every design conceivable to fertile brain. These 
singular vessels bore emigrants eager to found 
new commonwealths in the bounding West. 
Hailing from all parts of the Eastern States and 
many countries of Europe, they came with their 
women and children, their bundles, their tools, 
and their cattle — lusty, pushing folk, suffering 
on the way and in the early years of their settle- 
ment privations seldom if ever surpassed among 
the tales of the border. 

And now Kentucky's crops were larger than 
her population could consume. She needed to 
convey them to the markets of the world, to 
barter them for the goods and products of other 
communities. But Spain held firm control of 
the mouth of the Mississippi, and of the rich 
lands beyond the river, upon which our West- 



22 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 



erners were beginning to look with hungry eyes. 
The federal authorities of that day were slow 
to realize that the free navigation of the Missis- 
sippi was essential to the development of the 
West. Consequently there was much discontent 
among the leaders of Kentucky, fomented first 
by Spanish intrigues, and next by French — for 
France was at last beginning to display some 
jealousy of the young republic whom she had 
assisted into life, and apparently would fain have 
unofficially rejoiced both in Western secession 
and in the utilization of the trans- Alleghenians 
in filibustering expeditions against Spanish 
Louisiana. Through twenty years of its forma- 
tive period the West was thus in a state of secret 
ferment, the full story of which is even yet unre- 
vealed, but gradually is being brought into the 
light, fit material for historical romance. 

Spain, fearing an assault upon her posses- 
sions from British Canada, made flattering 
offers of land grants to those American pioneers 
who should colonize her territory and cast their 
fortunes with her people. Many discontented 
Kentuckians accepted these terms and moved 
on to Missouri — among them the wandering 
Boones, who were already sighing for ''more 
elbow room," and glad to be rid of the crowds, 
to get new and cheap lands, to avoid taxes, to 
hunt big game, and once more to live an Arcadian 



MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 23 

life. I love to picture the great Daniel, trans- 
planted in his old age to these fresh wilds beyond 
the great river, seated at the door of his little 
log cabin on Femme Osage Creek, dispensing 
justice as a Spanish syndic, by methods as prim- 
itive and arbitrary as those of an Oriental pasha. 
Caring little for rules of evidence as laid down 
in the books, saying he but wished to know the 
truth, the once mighty hunter oftentimes com- 
pelled both parties to a suit to divide the costs 
between them and begone. 

The brief term of the Spanish occupation 
of Louisiana was in itself rich in picturesque 
incident. The sparse population in New Orleans 
and in isolated hamlets clinging closely to the 
western banks of the Mississippi, was almost 
wholly French, although in the main officered 
by Spaniards, who sought somewhat cumbrously 
to graft a semblance of Spanish law and political 
machinery upon French ideas and the coutume 
de Paris. George Rogers Clark was much 
assisted by French-Canadian sympathy and not 
a little by the officials of Spain ; and in the South, 
our Revolution was strengthened by Spanish 
expeditions against the British in Florida. But 
with the coming of peace, it soon became evident 
that, as her price for these courtesies, Spain 
aimed at getting Illinois and a large slice of 
the country lying to the back of the Alleghenies 



24 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 

and abutting on the east bank of the Mississippi. 
The firmness of the American peace commis- 
sioners alone warded off these pretensions, and 
left the Mississippi as the western boundary of 
the United States. Five years before the cen- 
tury closed, Spain was induced by treaty to open 
the river to free navigation by Americans. 

By now, an incipient American empire had 
become established in the trans-Allegheny. Set- 
tlement had advanced slowly down the great 
eastern affluents of the Mississippi, as along the 
fingers of the hand — the broad and rich valley 
bottoms being occupied by a crude but hard- 
headed border folk, although the intervening 
highlands were as yet left untouched, save as 
farmer-hunters here roved for game to stock 
their larders. 

In the trans-Mississippi, there was also 
growth, although relatively small. The fur trade 
prospered, with St. Louis as its chief entrepot; 
on the eastern side, Kaskaskia was a like 
emporium. Itinerant merchants, usually French, 
pushed their way to the upper waters of the 
Mississippi and its northern tributaries, also 
into the southwest towards the Spanish com- 
mercial centre of Santa Fe. By the close of 
the century French traders had reached the 
Mandan villages at the great bend of the Mis- 
souri, where they came in contact with the agents 



MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 25 

of British fur-trade companies, who had jour- 
neyed thither from their fortified posts on the 
Assiniboin and the Saskatchewan. 

The great Napoleon had meanwhile risen to 
power. Reflecting upon the tragic story of the 
ousting of France from North America, he 
deemed it possible to rehabilitate New France 
to the west of the Mississippi, thus not only 
bringing credit to the mother-land, but checking 
the United States in its westward growth. Spain 
was therefore coerced into retroceding Louis- 
iana to its original European owner. 

There now came to pass another fateful 
move upon the political chess-board. Three 
years later — a war with Great Britain pending, 
fearful that his arch enemy might seize this new 
possession, needing money to replenish his treas- 
ury, and at the same time thinking to checlanate 
England by allowing her growing American rival 
to expand its bounds — Napoleon sold Louisiana 
to the United States, lacking but a year of two 
centuries after the first successful settlement of 
the French in Canada. It was but yesterday 
that with joyous acclaim we celebrated the hun- 
dredth anniversary of this epoch-making Pur- 
chase that has helped to make us one of the 
mightiest nations of the earth. The history of 
the transaction is today as household words. 



26 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 

But even had not the Louisiana Purchase 
been made just when it was, American acquisi- 
tion of the trans-Mississippi was sure to have 
come. A river is no adequate boundary between 
nations, if on one bank be a people feverish to 
cross, and on the other a lethargic folk. The 
Valley itself, is a geographical unit. Tens of thou- 
sands of Americans had by this time descended 
the eastern slope of the basin, and many had not 
even waited by the river side for a change in 
the political ownership of the western. We 
have seen Kentuckians before the Purchase, on 
Spanish lands along the lower reaches of the 
Missouri. The chief increase of Upper Louis- 
iana had in recent years been caused by Amer- 
ican borderers. They had settled on French 
lands near New Orleans ; and there was a dense 
American centre at Natchez. The great Pur- 
chase only hastened and facilitated our national 
progress. 

The ever-fascinating and thrilling tale of 
Lewis and Clark, as under Jefferson's masterly 
direction they broke the path for American civil- 
ization all the long rugged way from the mouth 
of the Missouri to the estuary of the Columbia, is 
still ringing afresh in our ears — embellished 
with new details, but recently brought to view, 
that make still more brilliant this glowing page 
in our Valley's history. 



I 



MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 27 

While still the great expedition was upon its 
route, other official explorers were searching the 
valleys of the Red, the Arkansas, and the Repub- 
lican, reaching out to Spanish New Mexico, and 
pushing on over the rich grazing plains of 
Nebraska and Kansas to the snow-capped peaks 
of the eastern Rockies. The golden age of Amer- 
ican exploration through the newly-acquired 
Territory of Louisiana, forms a splendid chapter 
in the annals of our race. The names of Pike, 
Long, Fremont, Carson, recall many a rare 
adventure in the cause of science. The records 
of the great rival fur-trading companies oper- 
ating in the trans-Mississippi, with their pictur- 
esque annual caravans over the Santa Fe and 
Oregon trails, and the stories of roving bands of 
trappers and scouts who in following the buffalo 
discovered mountain passes that are today high- 
ways of the world's commerce, furnish thrilling 
scenes to grace the pages of a thousand romances. 

In due time, the narrow paths of fur-traders, 
trappers, and explorers were broadened by emi- 
grants, who throughout the nation's history have 
ever crowded toward our Farthest West. The 
great migration to Oregon, in the forties of the 
last century, was an event of supreme signifi- 
cance. Bold and restless pioneers, heavily armed, 
set forth from the older settlements in wagons 
and on foot, with their women and children, with 



28 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 

herds of cattle and horses, and after slowly tra- 
versing the broad plains, painfully crept over 
the mountain barrier and spread themselves into 
the verdant valleys of the Willamette and the 
Columbia. 

Soon came the news that gold was discovered 
in California. Then followed another mighty 
westward rush over the transcontinental trails 
— within three years, a hundred thousand men 
and women from both hemispheres crossed the 
Mississippi in their mad struggle to reach the 
El Dorado of Pacific tidewater. Ten years 
later, the Colorado hills also revealed the story 
of their hidden wealth. Up the long valleys of 
the Platte, the Smoky Hill, and the Arkansas, 
singly and in caravans, wearily toiled tens of 
thousands from all the corners of the earth, many 
falling by the way from fatigue, starvation, and 
the wounds of Indian arrows; jet their exper- 
ience in no wise checking the hmnan tide that 
had set in the direction of the everlasting hills. 

Overland stages and "prairie schooners" 
were quickly withdrawn upon the advance of the 
Pacific railways. The buffalo and grizzly soon 
disappeared from our Western plains. The 
Indian, stoutly standing for his birthright, was 
subdued at last. The cow-boy succeeded the 
explorer and the trapper. Upon our great 
rivers, the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Mis- 



MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 29 

souri, the introduction of steamboats, and later 
the bankside railways, wrought a like trans- 
formation. The old river life with its pictur- 
esque but rowdy boatmen, its unwieldy produce- 
laden flats and keels and arks, began to pass 
away, and water traffic to approach the prosaic 
stage. 

Prosaic, perhaps, because near to our present 
vision. In this progressive land, however, we 
are ever living in a period of transition. For 
example, now that the great northern forests in 
our Valley have been nearly obliterated, and the 
day of the lumber raft is for us fast fading, and 
the ''lumber jack" in his particolored Mackinac 
blouse is about shifting his career to new fields 
of activity in the South and the Far Northwest, 
we can realize that he too has been a striking 
figure on our stage — worthy of a place beside 
the coureur de hois, the voyageur, the habitant, 
the buckskin-clad Scotch-Irislnnan of the Wil- 
derness Trail, the flat-boat man, the scout of the 
plains, the Rocky Mountain trapper, the Oregon 
pilgrim, the ''forty-niner," and the cow-boy. 
In our story of the West, also, we must leave 
many a page for the stout flood of agricultural 
settlement — in character differing widely from 
the Kentucky movement of fifty and sixty years 
before — that poured into the Middle West dur- 
ing the quarter of a century just previous to the 



30 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 

War of Secession. New England and New York, 
and almost every hamlet of western and northern 
Europe, sent the choicest of their people. By 
thousands, they came to found new fortunes on 
lands recently acquired by purchase from the 
tribesmen. Our local history is rich in stirring 
details of their migration, and in particulars of 
their privations and their hardihood. The pio- 
neers have in the order of nature now all but 
left us, and we are just beginning to understand 
that their story is a splendid epic still waiting 
to be sung. 

What may we not say, too, of the part our 
great Valley played in the war for the preserva- 
tion of the Union? As in the earlier days of 
the giant struggle between France and England 
for supremacy in North America, control of this 
vast drainage system was hotly contested. What- 
ever might have been the result of operations on 
the Atlantic Coast, the power holding the interior 
valley must surely in the end have won. From 
the population to the west of the Appalachians 
came the great bulk of both Northern and South- 
ern armies; nowhere was the struggle more 
nearly brought home to the people. Song and 
story will always find abundant theme in our 
local annals of the war. 

Equally important has been the Valley's 
share in the subsequent development of our 



MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 31 

nation — the social, economic, political, indus- 
trial, intellectual forces of the interior are today 
dominating us as a people. 

I cannot close my brief and imperfect glance 
at some of the elements that lend to the annals 
of the Mississippi Valley romance, dignity, and 
national significance, without again appealing to 
my colleagues in the field of "Western history, to 
look more kindly on its narrative side than has 
of late been the fashion. Documentary evidence 
is vital ; wherever possible it should be the basis 
of every historical structure, and its presentation 
falls peculiarly within the province of historical 
societies like this without which, and the his- 
torical seminars of the great universities, I fear 
that history as a science would soon languish 
among us. Monographic dissertation is like- 
wise essential, for the instruction of the few of 
light and leading who sit by the well-springs of 
knowledge. For well-digested, thoughtful, inter- 
pretive historical work there will, I trust, never 
cease to be demand among men and women of 
culture, although a distinguished pessimist has 
recently advanced the contrary view. 

My present concern, however, is with the 
multitude, who will have none of these things, 
yet who surely must be taught therein before we 
can inculcate in them a genuine love of country. 
In the histories of our Valley designed for pop- 



i'^ I , J9G8 



32 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY 

ular use, we must utilize not merely the ability 
to compile facts, to set them forth in orderly 
array, and to interpret their significance in con- 
nection with our larger national history, but 
with an eye keen for the picturesque we must 
cultivate that historical imagination which alone 
may irradiate and humanize the stirring records 
of our Past. Particularly for our schools should 
the histories of the West use life and action and 
color, if we are to remove State and local history 
from the ranks of unpopular studies, to make it 
a thing to lure the reader on and invite him to 
return. 

Humanity has ever been popularizing its 
history, that it may live in the minds of men. 
Folk lore is but a people 's hero tales. The story- 
teller in the Oriental market place, the bard in 
Scandinavian saga and in Scottish lay, are in 
our time represented by the poet and the novelist 
who, in their own fashion, interpret our history 
to the people. If they be truly masters of their 
art, let us courteously bid them welcome to the 
field of Western story, for their harps alone may 
make our annals live. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




